Geeky ex-librarian with a fondness for pop culture and Godzilla.

Tag Archives: detroit

Hey, it’s been 27 Weeks, over half a year and … it feels like it’s been twice that long. Week 27 was out of control. I told a few people that it used to be thing a day, but now it feels like 500. A few minutes later I joked about remembering what it was like when there was only one thing a week that was destroying our democracy. My, how things have changed and not for the better.

The Ghost Files: US historians have long complained about gaps in the National Archives. Can big-data analysis show what kinds of information the government is keeping classified? (Columbia)

China Gives Hong Kong Its Worst: If China wants Hong Kong residents to stop taking to the streets in protest, it should start picking better leaders. Of course, that’s exactly why an estimated 300,000 demonstrated yesterday and almost 800,000 voted in a recent unofficial referendum: to gain the right to choose the city’s chief executive officer. (Bloomberg View)

Hobby Lobby Is Only the Beginning: A country that cannot even agree on the idea of religious accommodation, let alone on what terms, is unlikely to agree on what to do next. A country in which many states cannot manage to pass basic anti-discrimination laws covering sexual orientation is one whose culture wars may be beyond the point of compromise. And a nation whose marketplace itself is viewed, for better or worse, as a place to fight both those battles rather than to escape from them is still less likely to find surcease from struggle. (New York Times)

The Urgent Need to Shield Journalism in the Age of Surveillance: The media landscape has been transformed by NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s decision to leak a vast cache of documents to select journalists, notably at the Guardian and the Washington Post, which made global headlines a year ago this month. And “the new challenge this year is how to maintain the Internet as somewhere for free expression and innovation,” as Michael Maness, VP of journalism and innovation at the Knight Foundation, said. (PBS)

I heard a interview/story on the BBC about Mteto Maphoyi, a young South African man who sings Opera. Unfortunately I couldn’t find the BBC link, but I did find his talk for TEDxTeen. It is exceptional, as is his singing.